People worry about the NSA but members of Congress just need to remember where their Radio Shack-bought surveillance cameras are located before they start making out with a staffer. It looks like newly elected Rep. McAllister (R-LA), who came to office on the wave of Duck Dynasty-mania may have a problem.
Good lord. I don’t think the NTSB would approve. But if we could get big government off our backs we could perhaps get roads like this one in the Himalaya mountains. Not for the faint of heart video after the jump …
Sheila Bapat writes that a Mets player getting slammed for taking just two days paternity leave demonstrates just how much we value fathers: “Eighty-five percent of U.S. firms and 94 percent of states do not offer any paid leave for men. By contrast, 50 percent of businesses offer paid maternity leave.”
With Sahil Kapur’s piece today on Republican fears that Obamacare might actually succeed, I wanted to focus everyone’s attention on the seminal ‘Kristol Memo‘ from 1993, a document that shaped the successful effort to block health care reform in 1994 and, I believe, played a largely unheralded and pivotal role shaping the DC GOP in the last 20 years. You can read the actual memo here; and I strongly recommend that you do. The gist of Kristol’s prescription was massive resistance: no haggling or negotiating, as might have been the Bob Dole approach. Just no. No negotiation, no bill, no acceptance that there was such a thing as a crisis in care.
Boehner rushes to reassure Drudge he’s trying repeal not expand Obamacare.
I’ve been whittling away at this “brittle grip” series for a while now. And I confess it’s the first contemporary or public issue that I’ve felt any urge to write about at length in many years. But since I’m not able to do that I’ve had to content myself with observation, anecdote and hypotheses. Social psychology, economics, extensive interviews and much more would be necessary to really grasp the issue in all its dimensions. That’s why I was so charged to receive this reader email on the brittle grip theme from TPM Reader ML. It’s really, really worth your time to read.
I am an MBA and, after working in the “private sector” for a good while am back in the public policy world. I am also a fellow Brown grad (and long time reader – since early 2000s).
Anyway, I was, at one point, a real free market believer. I did some Jeff Sachs goes to Bolivia type of stuff. It was a heady time – the 90s. The market could bring prosperity to peasants in Bolivia (if only they let us privatize retirement and force them to become investors somehow). The market was good for you and everyone.
Sarah Erdreich: It’s actually a huge problem when Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia are spouting unscientific nonsense by calling contraceptive methods “abortifacients.”
A charity hockey game between the NYPD and the NYFD degenerates (or perhaps ascends?) into an epic brawl between cops and firefighters. Watch.
Thanks for all the reactions to yesterday’s piece on the Brendan Eich saga. There is one point that has come up again and again in email exchanges and I wanted to address it clearly. It seems quite likely to me that the whole Eich story would have turned out very differently if Eich had simply said something to the effect of, “Yes, I did that in 2008. But like the rest of the country, my views have changed over the last 5 years. I was wrong and I’m sorry.” If he’d said that – sincerely or not – I suspect the whole crisis would have subsided and he’d still be on the job.